33 different faces of Digbeth

The idea of snapping faces developed during today’s photowalk around Digbeth, a district just south of Moor Street Station in Birmingham that’s a little bit arty, a little bit gritty and with a whole lot of industrial heritage contained within. Thanks to Matt & Pete’s Photo School for running the two-hour walk – more photowalk events can be found here. A night-time walk is apparently imminent.

La Gomera after the fire…

… is still very beautiful despite the devastating fires of August 2012. More blogging to come but here are some hopefully surprising shots of La Gomera, one of the more unusual and less-visited Canary Island. They show that La Gomera is still very much open for business. (Click on each pic to pull up the locations. More/better pics from Pete Ashton aare going up by degrees on Flickr.)

Invest in an expedition, art and travel journalism

Flo! © Jason Florio

I met Jason Florio (‘Flo’) on a trip to The Gambia in 2007, while covering an eco tourism story for the Independent on Sunday.

He was a freelance photojournalist with a ‘boy’s own’ adventure of a life that involved being paid to travel, photograph and document human interest stories, anywhere from Afghanistan to Libya, India to Cuba.

Travels around my garden

What do you take holiday photos of? And can that be applied to your own backyard? Well let’s see. In a new destination, seeing it with Alice-in-Wonderland eyes, I take photos of:

The main attractions

10 Lanzarote must-sees – in pictures

1. Papagayo beaches. You have to negotiate an unpaved road to get there – and clean your hire car before returning it – but it’s well worth the bumpy ride. Three euros entrance price per car into this national park area. Go to the third beach along for the best snorkelling.

Neon in the rain

Tip: If you ever find yourself at Piccadilly Circus (or Times Square, or any other neon-lit traffic interchange) in the rain, look down – it’s lovely!

Best thing about Brussels #2: The Atomium

Surely Brussels’ Atomium is on a list somewhere of the world’s top 10 most astonishing buildings. Hand-riveted bolt by bolt in the 1950s into the shape of a 102-metre-high iron molecule, this is a building that only a photo can do it justice. So here’s a couple more…

A tour of Birmingham’s ring road (drives me to despair)

Who said local tourism had to be glamorous?

As part of the first Still Walking festival, urban planner Joe Holyoak’s Walk the Queensway tour was the first walk of the event to sell out. I’m not sure of the attraction for others but for me it was an excellent follow-up to last weekend’s Architectonic, Concrete Walls 1958-1980 exhibition of photos in Brussels (which sounds incredibly pretentious now that I write it down but more down-to-earth words will come in a future post about the Atomium).

Gare de Lyon’s tropical garden

I wrote on The Journey’s the thing that I missed getting a shot of the underground tropical garden paradise on the Paris Metro (Line 14, platform on the Olympiades direction side). But I got it on the way back.

Here it is…

Around the Cantal in 10 dishes

‘In France the conversation always comes round to food’ – which is no surprise when the food is of such high quality and presentation as we saw this week.

The payback is that I found the red meatiness, full flavours and multiple courses too rich for my English constitution and, at night in my bed, I frequently couldn’t sleep for the long slow digestion process. Meanwhile the winding mountain roads twisted the knife of queaziness.

But there is no doubting that French food is a gourmet treat (at the time) and so I recorded some of the meals on our ‘Cantal in winter’ trip.